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Space, Borders and Boundaries in the Letter of Aristeas

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Space, Borders and Boundaries in the Letter of Aristeas Space, Borders and Boundaries in the Letter of Aristeas Barbara Schmitz Representation of space in literary writings is not just decorative, but plays an important narrative function. Therefore, space is not only the place where something happens, but also includes the whole spatial construction of a literary writing. Narrative analysis has often focused on representations of time in liter- ary texts and has paid less attention to the representations of space. But over the past decades, a lot of work in narratological, cultural, gender and postcolonial studies, etc. has been done to bring questions of space and the representation of space to the fore.1 The analysis of space constructions in literary writings leads to recognizing the question of boundaries as a crucial point in the spatial con- struction of a text. Representations of space in literature analyze the geographical and topo- graphical settings and clarify where the plot happens, where objects and aspects of reality are located, and how the setting of a scene is narratively construed. Quite often, these settings have opposing elements: inside the house or outside the house, on the top of the mountain or in the valley, etc. These settings do not have a decorative function, but have a specific meaning within the narra- 1 M. G. Henderson ed., Borders, Boundaries, and Frames. Essay in Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies (London / New York: Routledge, 1995). R. Jenkins, Social Identity (Lon- don: Routledge, 1996). K. Wenz, Raum, Raumsprache und Sprachräume. Zur Textsemiotik der Raumbeschreibung (Tübingen: Narr, 1997). L. McDowell and J. P. Sharp, Space, Gender, Knowledge. Feminist Readings (London: Arnold, 1997). E. W. B. Hess-Lüttich et.al. eds., Signs and Space / Raum und Zeichen (Tübingen: Narr, 1998). M. Reif-Hülser ed., Borderlands. Nego- tiating Boundaries in Post-Colonial Writing (Amsterdam / Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999). C. Benthien and I. M. Krüger-Fürhoff eds., Über Grenzen. Limitation und Transgression in Literatur und Ästhetik (Stuttgart / Weimar: Metzler, 1999). R. Görner and S. Kirkbright eds., Nachdenken über Grenzen (Munich: Iudicium, 1999). B. Haupt, “Zur Analyse des Raumes,” in: Einführung in die Erzähltextanalyse. Kategorien, Modelle, Probleme (P. Wenzel ed.; Trier: WVT, Wiss. Verl., 2004), 69–87. B. Janowski, “Unterscheiden – Überschreiten – Entgrenzen. Zum Umgang mit Grenzen im Alten Testament,” in: Veröffentlichungen der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft für Theologie 33 (H. Schweitzer ed.; Gütersloh: Kaiser, 2009), 32–54. K. James-Chakraborty and S. Strümper-Krobb eds., Crossing Borders. Space beyond Disciplines (Oxford: Lang, 2011). M. Huber, C. Lubkoll, St. Martus and Y. Wübben eds., Literarische Räume. Architekturen – Ordnungen – Medien (Berlin: Akademie-Verl., 2012). A. Nünning, “Raum / Raumdarstellung, literarische(r),” in: Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. Ansätze – Personen – Grund- begriffe (A. Nünning ed.; Stuttgart / Weimar: Metzler, 2013), 634–638. 144 Barbara Schmitz tive: “Spatial opposites are construed as models for narrative opposites”2 and therefore fulfill a crucial function in the interpretation of a text through their metaphorical, psychological, and other meanings. When they differentiate one location from another, boundaries play a very important role in the construction of space in literary writings. They constitute different areas and result in an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’. For example, let us as- sume that there is one character in a text who is able to cross a boundary, but another is not able or allowed to do so. Separation and exclusion are not the only functions of boundaries in texts; they can also put people together in order to constitute a group. Boundaries very often have social functions in setting limits for constructing an identity and constituting a group.3 Therefore, boundaries do have an important impact on the constitution of a society – in reality as well as in fiction. Thus, special attention must be paid to boundaries in literature, as well as to how they are constructed, how they include or exclude, how they stabilize identities, and who is able or allowed to cross the border and who is not. In his study “The Structure of the Artistic Text,”4 the Estonian scholar Jurij M. Lotman (1922–1993) places the question of space and boundaries in the center of his text analyses: “The simplest and most fundamental case is when the space of a text is divided by some boundary into two parts and each character belongs to one of them. But more complex situations are possible too in which differ- ent characters not only belong to different spatial areas, but are associated with different, occasionally incompatible, types of spatial division. […] There arises a sort of spatial polyphony, the play of different sorts of spatial division for each.”5 According to Lotman’s concept, the ‘hero-agent’ of a story is the one (human or non-human character) who is able to cross the border in question and who also belongs to the other subspace: “[T]he border between these subsets, which under normal circumstances is impenetrable, though in a given instance […] it proves to be penetrable for the hero-agent.”6 Therefore, boundaries quite often have a paradoxical function: In arranging structures, they seem to ‘tidy up’ the world. By doing so, boundaries frequently present a clear and often very simple view of the real or fictional world. They place subjects in this or that space, allow or forbid, enable or reject. But a closer look quite often shows that these boundaries are much more fluid than they ap- pear to be at first: “selectivity, fluidity, dynamism, permeability are all intrinsic to the construction of boundaries; yet so too are layers of rhetoric and power. 2 M. Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1988), 257. 3 F. Barth ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Organization of Cultural Difference (Oslo / London: Universitetsforlaget, 1969). 4 J. M. Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text (Michigan: Univ. of Michigan, 1977) [Struk- tura khudozhestvennogo teksta, 1971]. 5 Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, 231. 6 Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, 240. Space, Borders and Boundaries in the Letter of Aristeas 145 Stability and continuity are claimed by appeal to the past, but this is a conceit made necessary by the novelties of the present. Where rhetoric constructs the boundary as immutable and impenetrable, we may suspect actual invasion and penetration.”7 1. Spatial representation and boundaries in the Book of Aristeas The Book of Aristeas8 is characterized by a wide variety of boundaries. The first to be discussed is a basic, but rarely heeded boundary crossing: Who is “Aris- teas” in the Book of Aristeas? To what extent can the character “Aristeas” be understood as a boundary crossing? Then the geography in the Book of Aristeas will be examined, which is char- acterized by two centers in the narrated time: Alexandria and Jerusalem. The geographical boundary between these two cities is transgressed by various char- acters; the question will be whether these characters thereby become relevant actors (“hero-agents”) or who takes on this role in the Book of Aristeas (topo- logical boundary). Another demarcation in the text relates to the question of the Jewish conception of life, about which the Egyptian delegation asks and to which the high priest responds by explaining that Moses, as a lawgiver, sur- rounded the people with “impregnable ramparts and walls of iron” (ἀδιακόποις χάραξι καὶ σιδηροῖς τείχεσιν Arist 139). This practical boundary is to be discussed in consideration of a fourth demarcation in the Book of Aristeas, the theological boundary: does the Book of Aristeas really extend the declaration of belief in the one and only God, central to the identity of Israel, to include an equation with the gods of the peoples, as is often assumed? 2. Who narrates the Book of Aristeas? A first boundary crossing In the Book of Aristeas, a Greek writer “Aristeas” ( Ἀριστέας) presents himself as a text-internal author. Thus Aristeas is the first-person narrator who relates from his perspective in retrospect the events regarding how the desire to acquire the writings of the Jews for the library of Alexandria was realized. This Aristeas introduces himself as a Greek and non-Jew (Arist 16; 121–171), who was re- portedly working as a high court official at the court of King Ptolemy II (Arist 1–8). As first-person narrator, he reports (διήγησις “report”; Arist 1; 18; 322) to Philocrates on the past events (Arist 1). 7 J. M. Lieu, “‘Impregnable Ramparts and Walls of Iron’: Boundary and Identity in Early ‘Judaism’ und ‘Christianity,” NTS 48 (2002): 297–313, 309. 8 The translation follows M. Hadas, Aristeas to Philocrates (Letter of Aristeas) (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951). 146 Barbara Schmitz At the same time Aristeas is also part of the world that he narrates and in which he appears: Aristeas describes, for example, how he traveled to Jerusalem and spoke to the high priest there. Aristeas therefore has a dual role: he is both the narrator and a character. As a narrator, he describes the events from his per- spective in retrospect in the form of an ongoing story, in which he, as an acting character, plays a crucial role, and appears therefore as a contemporary narrator and in the past events as an actor. Following Gérard Genette, one can therefore describe Aristeas as an intradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator.9 In his dual role, this Aristeas is a fictional character (“fictional identity of B.Ar.’s narrator”10). Aristeas as the intradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator must be clearly distin- guished from the pseudonymous writer / author of the Book of Aristeas that could possibly have been a Jew (and could be described as “Pseudo-Aristeas”). “The fictional identity of B.Ar.’s narrator introduces an important shift as com- pared to the real author.
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